An interview with Jim Forest made in mid-October 2007 by Elena Nazarova for Nikolaas in de Jordaan, the quarterly journal of St. Nicholas of Myra Russian Orthodox Church, located in the Jordaan district of Amsterdam. For more about the parish, see its web site: www.orthodox.nl. EN: Dear Jim, we know you for a long time [...]
Interview made by Jim Forest at the Voogd apartment in Amsterdam on the fifth of April, 1990. [starting the tape recorder] This looks serious! But will my English make sense? I admire your gift for languages. Oh, Jim! There are blank spots in my English and they are getting more and more. Can you [...]
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
(a talk given in Prades, France, May 2006, in the course of a pilgrimage organized by the Thomas Merton Society of Canada) by Jim Forest Each of us has a memory of Merton’s entrance into our lives. Usually it has to do with coming upon one of his books. It is the same for me. [...]
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A round table discussion between a few of Merton’s friends – Tommie O’Callaghan, Donald Allchin, Jim Forest and John Wu, Jr. (a conversation chaired by David Scott, chairman of the Thomas Merton Society of Great Britain and Irealnd) David Scott: The title of this conference is Your Heart is My Hermitage. We didn’t pick it [...]
by Jim Forest My parents were people radically out of step with the America of the cold-war fifties. In those days they both belonged to the Communist Party. This made me a “red-diaper baby.” Yet religious inspiration played a major part in the lives of my parents as long as I can remember. An orphan [...]
This is the journal Nancy and I kept during a ten-day stay in Istanbul in 2003. Some of the photos taken in that period are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/166648/ 24 April 2003, Holy Thursday Are we in Istanbul? Or Constantinople? Winston Churchill had no doubt it was the latter. As he wrote in a memo to the [...]
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Often works of biography reveal more about the author than about his subject. Mark Shaw’s recent book about Thomas Merton strikes me as a case in point. Here is the review I wrote for the Winter issue of The Merton Seasonal. Jim * * * Beneath the Mask of Holiness: Thomas Merton and the Forbidden [...]
by Jim Forest But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you… – Jesus Christ (Matthew 5:44) Passenger planes taken by terrorists fly into the two towers of the World Trade Center; the buildings collapse and thousands are killed. Many more are wounded. Still more now suffer from having [...]
Here is a copy of a preface I’ve written for the forthcoming Romanian edition of The Wormwood File: E-Mail from Hell. A page about the English-language edition of the book is here: http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2005/01/03/the-wormwood-file-e-mail-from-hell/ A few years ago I was thinking of sending a copy of C.S. Lewis’s book, The Screwtape Letters, to a cousin who [...]
a review by Jim Forest of Frank Scheaffer’s memoir Frank Schaeffer doesn’t really fit into a brief description. An American, he grew up in rural Switzerland. His parents were fervent Calvinist missionaries living in a Catholic culture which they regarded as barely Christian. Their chalet, known as L’Abri, became a house of hospitality in which [...]
